by Mark Twain
s "Introduction," DE, XXVII, X.
• The reference here is to the original, clothbound edition (University of California Press, 1969).
MTSatan, pp. 14-15.
7 In the present text, the sequence runs through chapters 1 and 2, the opening of chapter 3, and part of chapter 10. See MTSatan, pp. 38-39.
O The reference to arr's grandmother, who "cured bad headaches by kneading the person's head and neck with her fingers," places the writing of this passage some time after July 1899. See Explanatory Notes.
8 written in London and in Sanna,LSweden, constitute chapThese episodes, ters 3 through 5 of the resent text.
10 MTSatan, pp. 49-50.
11 Notebook 32, TS p. 50. MT's holograph manuscript of this and all other notebooks cited are in MTP. The entry is printed with Mark Twain's workingnotes in Appendix B of this volume. Passages enclosed in angle brackets are canceled in the original.
12 Notebook 32, TS p. 25.
13 "Mark Twain's Images of Hannibal: From St. Petersburg to Eseldorf," Texas Studies in English, XXXVII (1958), 3-23.
14 "Villagers of 1840-3" is included in HH&T. See also SCH, p. 128.
16 Orion Clemens had died on 11 December 1897.
15 SLC to Frank E. Burrough, 15 December 1900 (TS in MTP).
17 MTSatan,_pp.J17-23.
l6 "Stirring lies in Austria," Hadleyburg, p. 323.
Appendix B, SCH, pp. 131-133; HH&T, Appendix A.
20 ark Twain's Letters to Will Bowen, ed. Theodore Hornberger (Austin, 1941), p. 18. Even Dr. Wheelwright, "the stately old First-Family Virginian and imposing Thinker of the village,' is probably a sketch from life of the "aged Virginian physician Dr. [Humphrey] Peake" as Wecter notes in SCH, p. 67; see also HH&T, Appendix A.
22 Notebook 35, TS p. 12 (10 May 1902); MT's workingnotes, in Appendix B; "Villagers," HH&T.
21 MTHL, p, 195.
23 Probably in the summer of 1848 according to Wecter, SCH, p. 202. The fictional Moses Haas, "never good for 600 on a fat take," sounds like the compositor-editor of Clemens's boyhood, "full of blessed egotism and placid selfimportance," who would "smouch all the poetry" on the day before publication and 'leave the rest to 'jeff' for the solid takes,' described in "The Compositor," Hartford Courant, 20 January 1886.
24 Autobiographical Dictation, 29 March 1906, TS in MTP; MTA, II, 276282; SCH, pp. 204-205, where Dixon Wecter notes the similarity.
25I am expanding the trinity defined by Coleman 0. Parsons in his "The Devil and Samuel Clemens," Virginia Quarterly Review, XXIII (Autumn 1947), 595600. Much the fullest summary and discussion of influences in literature and life before Tuckey is Parsons's "The Background of The Mysterious Stranger," American Literature, XXXII (March 1960), 55-74. Behind Philip Traum, Parsons shows the figures of Pausanias in Adolf Wilbrandt's The Master of Palmyra, Goethe's Mephistopheles, the angel Jesrad in Voltaire's Zadig, and of course the boy Savior of the Apocryphal New Testament.
28 "Is Shakespeare Dead?." What Is Man?, pp. 307-310.
See Appendix 9.
27 Satan's genealogy in Mark Twain's thought has been brilliantly outlined by Coleman Parsons; see note 25 above.
29 HH&T, pp. 44-45.
80 MTB, p 146;Parsons, The Devil and Samuel Clemens, p; 593.
H3 MT-TB, pp. 252-253. This key source was first noted by Gladys Bellamy in Mark Twain as a Literary Artist (Norman, Oklahoma, 1950), pp. 352-353. See 1. Infancy, Chapter XV, 1-7 and Chapter XIX, 3 and II. Infancy, Chapter I in The Apocryphal New Testament, 2d ed. (London: William Hone, 1820).
82 Notebook 28, TS pp. 34-35 (10 November 1895). Clemens had long since learned the art of scoffing satire under the pseudonym Mark Twain, and also under the convention of a foreigner's writing letters home on his first visit to a new country-for example, Ah Song Hi's letters to Ching-Foo in Twain's early sketch, "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again" (The Curious Republic of Candour [New York, 19191, pp. 75-109). Satan's "Letters from the Earth" is only one of several series that show Mark Twain an expert in the convention.
88 J4adleyburg, pp. 215-25 1.
33 Notebook 28, TS y. 51 (8 December'1895). One of the things that Satan said, "with discontent,' was, "The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people in hell-whereas you are merely the most numerous" (MTN, p. 324). The entry was made about I January 1897.
'* Euro,e,.pp _211-220..
NotetoolC ,32a, TS p. 37; MTSatan, p. 31.
"Tuckey lists the dales of composition for all the manuscripts in a very useful table; MTSatan, p. 76. ^ ^'^ T
37 The manuscript, Paine 255 in MTP, has Mark Twain's room at the Metropole for its settin._
42 "The Stupendous Procession," a "fearful document" indeed as Paine called it, presents a pageant of warring nations, slaughter, and corpses presided over by a 'Frivolous Stranger." The piece was intended for New Year's Day, 1902; MTB, pp. 1149-1150 prints a few paragraphs; MS is in MTP (DV345). "Sold to Satan' conjures up the devil, glowing with radium and clothed in a skin of polonium (Europe, pp. 326-338, written 1903-1904). "That Day in Eden (Passage from Satan s Diary)" sadly explicates man's acquisition of the Moral Sense as the saddest result of the Fall (Europe, pp. 339-346). The offensive stranger in "The Dervish and the Offensive Stranger' uneasily explains the downfall of the American Indians, the Filipinos, the Boers, and the Chinese (Europe, P f. 310-314). By 1905, the "aged stranger" of "The War Prayer" takes the place of a minister in a cathedral to pray for the total annihilation of the enemy in the name of the "spirit of love" (Europe, pp. 394-398). As late as 1909 Mark Twain assumed the mask of Satan once again in the eleven "Letters from the Earth"-published in Letters from the Earth, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York, 1962), pp. 3-55. ^, w -11
89 Hadleyburg, V. 2, 3, 67, 81. Twain offered the manuscript to a publisher on 2 November 1898 (Notebook 32, TS p. 48).
40 Notebook 32, TS pp. 39-40 (September 1898). This descendant of Lilith may be the germ for Orrin Lloyd Godkin, one more disparager of the human race, in "Indiantown" (WWD, pp. 163-166).
*i Literary Essays, "Definitive Edition" (New York, 1923), XXII, 264, 265.
'° Notebook 30, TS p. 53 (post 19 June 1896).
"MTN, p..363.
48 "Villagers" in HH&T.
" See Appendix B.
47 Several parallels exist in W. E. H. Lecky's account of how a Scottish mob stoned to death a certain Jane Corphar in 1704-1705. Accused of witchcraft, she had been released by the magistrates; but the minister of the town incited the mob to beat her in the presence of her two daughters. Eventually the mob had forced "a man with a sledge and horse to drive several times over her head" (A History of England in the Eighteenth Century [New York, 1892], II, 331-333). Mark Twain owned Lecky's History.
48 Mather included in his book the report of a woman's confession at the stake, in Scotland in 1649:
As I must make answer to the God of Heaven, I declare I am as free from Witchcraft as any Child, but being accused by a Malicious Woman, and Imprisoned under the Name of a Witch, my Husband and Friends disowned me, and seeing no hope of ever being in Credit again, through the Temptation of the Devil, I made that Confession to destroy my own Life, being weary of it, and chusing rather to Die than to Live (Mr. Sinclare's Invisible World, cited in The Wonders of the Invisible World [London, 1862], p. 278; original edition, Boston, 1693).
Coleman Parsons in "The Background of The Mysterious Stranger" cites Sir Walter Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), letter IX.
'° See also Parsons's citations in his "The Background of The Mysterious Stranger," pp. 65-68, particularly to chapter eight of Louisa May Alcott's Little Men.
50 MTTB, pp. 252-253.
61 Following the Equator (Hartford, 1897), p. 256, chapter 27.
83 MTL, p. 683.
B6 Compare the tree-growing juggler in Ceylon and Dan Beard's picture, "The White Man's World," which shows the white man in the sun-helmet and illustrates Twain's assertion in the text, "The world was made for man-the white
man" (Following the Equator, p. 339 and pp. 186-187).
52 MTB, pp. 1079, 1235.
r-- 54 MTL, p. 699.
r. ---- ss MTHL, p. 715.
07 "The Missionary in World-Politics," with letter to C. Moberly Bell, editor of the London Times; unpublished MS inMTP.
68 Why did Clemens fail to refer to the Spanish-American war in the Mysterious Stranger stories? Presumably the answer lies in the fact that the "Chronicle" and "Schoolhouse Hill" were dro?ped before he returned to the United States in October 1900, and that "No. 44' scarcely touches on war as a theme. In the fall of 1900 Twain became convinced that the liberation of Cuba, which he applauded, was degenerating into imperialist war in the Philippines, and that even British civilization could not justify the "single little shameful war" in South Africa against the Boer Republics. He wrote four widely read and reprinted attacks upon American missionaries and the European powers in China, upon Chamberlain, McKinley and his administration, and upon the Czar of Russia. They are "A Salutation-Speech from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth" in the New York Herald of 30 December 1900; "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" in the North American Review of February 1901; "To My Missionary Critics" in the same magazine for April 1901; and The Czar's Soliloquy" in the Review for March 1905. He joined the New England Anti-Imperialist League in 1900, and wrote much more, published and unpublished, on disarmament and the possibility that new weapons might make war obsolete. For a discussion of his anti-war writing from 1898 to 1902, see William M. Gibson, "Mark Twain and Howells, Anti Imperialists," New England Quarterly, XX (December 1947), 435-470.
69 MTHL, p. 699.
60 Following the Equator, y. 119, chapter 10.
81 Notebook 35 (1902):1{S_pp^39-40.
62 Walter J. Meserve, ed., The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells (New York, 1960).
63 MTSatan, pp. 26-28; MTHL, p. 659.
°4 MTN, pp. +348-351.
65 SLC to Wayne MacVeagh, 22 August 1897, in MTP.
SLC to T. B. Aldrich, 14 February 1904 (Harvard).
69 DE, XXVII, 299.
70 MTHL, pp. 675-678; MTW, pp. 118-120; and "Which Was the Dream?" in WWD.
71 New York Times, "The Drama," 7 July 1900.
72 Notebook 34 (1901), TS p. 21b. These notes and fragments are closely linked to Clemens's metaphor that the death of Susv had left the family helpless "derelicts" in an immense empty ocean. The metaphor recurs in letters to Francis H. Skrine, Twichell, and Howells. It becomes the settin of two manuscript fragments of the period, "The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness" WWD, pp. 76 86) and "The Great Dark" (WWD, pp. 102-150). See SLC to Skrine, 19 January 1897, Roger Barrett Collection; to Twichell, 19 January 1897, MTL, p. 640; to Howells, 22 January 1898. MTHL, pp. 670-671.
es Notebook 31, TS pp. 41-43 (6 January 1897).
67 MTL, p: 777, 24 September 1905; MTN, p. 395, 24 September 1905.
73 See MT's working notes, Appendix B.
74 Dated Lee, Massachusetts, 28 July 1904 (MS at Yale University, TS in MTP).
47 "The Background of The Mysterious Stranger," pp. 71-72. Clemens knew Shakespeare's plays well. On the Mississippi he heard George Ealer declaim Shakespeare, and read the plays in his spare time, and after he was a writer, he burlesqued Shakespeare often. He cites Shakespeare as an example of supreme genius in "Chronicle," chapter 2. As early as 1873 Mark Twain quoted part of the dream-passage from The Tempest in "A Memorable Midnight Experience"; Howells located the passage for him in 1876; Mark Twain alluded to it again in 1889 in A Connecticut Yankee; and he quoted it at length in 1909 in the essay "Is Shakespeare Dead?" (Europe, p. 5; see Yankee [New York, 1889], p 205, chapter XVII; MTHL, p. 127; What Is Man?, p. 362). Tuckey corroborates Twain's knowing The Tempest. After completing all but chapter 33 of "No. 44" (which was an afterthought), Clemens told his daughter Clara that he had broken his bow and burned his arrows-very probably his own version of Prospero's speech, "I'll break my staff, ... And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book" (MTSatan, p. 69). Finally, some part of the tone and imagery of 44's last speech to August may also derive from Belial's speech in Book II of Paradise Lost:
I am indebted to my former student Mrs. Barbara Fass for this brief but striking parallel.
'S MTHL, p. 845.
76 Roughing It (Hartford, 1872), p. 550, chapter 76.
78 Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton, 1966), pp. 270, 272.
• "Sister" in the Methodist, or Presbyterian, or Baptist, or Campbellite churchnothing more. A common form, in those days [MT s note].
1 MTSatan, pp. 34-36.
1 MTSatan, pp. 16-24.
3 MTSatan, p. 44.
1 MTSatan, p. 47.
1 "'It seems to me" begins a new paragraph in the manuscript.
I MTSatan, p. 57.